Brent Hinds lost his life in a motorcycle accident on a Wednesday night in Atlanta.
Back when he was a teen in Birmingham, Alabama, William Brent Hinds was all about the banjo and wild ideas, and he even learned how to tap on guitar strings, which later became his thing. He once told The Guardian’s Stevie Chick, “I was very dysfunctional at school, just a jackass. I’d take LSD and come to class still tripping. I was too creative, never doing my homework, just filling my notepad up with drawings of skulls.” School wasn’t really his scene, but he did spend a year learning classical guitar at the Alabama School of Fine Arts before heading to Atlanta in the mid-’90s.
It’s kind of funny—sometimes people just decide to make big changes, and that’s what happened when Hinds saw Troy Sanders perform with Four Hour Fogger and then basically joined the band himself. After that group ended, Hinds and Sanders teamed up with Brann Dailor and Bill Kelliher, and that’s how Mastodon started around 2000.
The first Mastodon album, Remission, dropped in 2002, and Hinds and Sanders shared both the singing and songwriting. The band really blew up with Leviathan in 2004, which was all about Moby Dick and got everyone talking. Later, Blood Mountain in 2007 got them a Grammy nod, though things got rough at a wild MTV VMAs where Hinds ended up in a coma for three days after a fight. He eventually got better, even after brain bleeding, a busted nose, and two black eyes.
Fans always wonder how bands keep going after tough times.
After that, Mastodon kept changing up their sound. They tried new things on Crack the Skye in 2009 (where Dailor started singing more), and then made The Hunter in 2011, which Hinds dedicated to his brother who had passed away. Their last few albums with Hinds included Once More ’Round the Sun in 2014, Emperor of Sand in 2017 (which finally won them a Grammy), and the double album Hushed and Grim in 2021.
According to Atlanta News First and the police, Hinds was riding his Harley when an SUV didn’t stop and hit him, which caused the crash. The accident was called unintentional, and he was 51 when he died from injuries.
